create-contact-list-from-image-or-spreadsheet
Turn a roster — a phone photo of a printed sign-in sheet, a screenshot, a PDF, a CSV, or a spreadsheet — into a verified contact CSV, importable vCards for iPhone and Android, and a comma-separated E.164 number list ready to paste into Messages. Use whenever the user drops a photo of a list of people and wants it "parsed", whenever they say "make contact cards", "generate vCards", "get these into my phone", "make a WhatsApp group from this", "I need everyone's numbers", "turn this roster into a CSV"; whenever an event/cohort/conference/class/retreat roster needs to become a group chat; whenever numbers need normalizing to E.164. Encodes the band-crop transcription discipline that makes photo OCR trustworthy (EXIF auto-orient, overlapping full-res bands — never read digits off a downscaled overview), the E.164-always rule, the name-prefix trick that survives WhatsApp's names-only picker search, the one-vCard-format-covers-both-platforms fact, the flag-don't-fix verification pass, and the hard reality that WhatsApp has no bulk-add — invite links are the fallback.